Homeland defense chief assesses priorities. (Security Beat).

The U.S. Northern Command, responsible for domestic security, needs to improve its capabilities to defend the land and the waterways, said Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.

While Northern Command's ability to protect the air space of the United States is undisputed, the land and maritime defense missions pose more of a challenge, for several reasons, McHale told a meeting of industry executives in Washington, D.C.

When Northern Command was created last year, it already had an air-defense organization, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. NORAD is the bi-national command for air space warning and control for Canada, Alaska, and the continental United States.

Air Force Gen. Ralph "Ed" Eberhart heads both the Northern Command and NORAD. Even though Eberhart reports directly to the defense secretary, McHale oversees all NorthCom activities.

So far, the Northern Command has been assigned "very few land forces," mostly due to historical resistance by the United States to have a "large standing Army" participating in domestic operations, McHale explained.

Having a small land force is not a problem as long as there are no major crises on the continental United States, he noted. The difficulty for Northern Command is figuring out how it could quickly surge the land force and ensure that those troops are "mission ready," in the event of a terrorist attack, for example.

The command also is grappling with how to boost maritime security, a job that typically has been done by the Coast Guard. For air defense, NORAD's jurisdiction extends 500 nautical miles off the Pacific Coast and 1,500 miles off the Atlantic Coast. The Coast Guard's only reaches 12 nautical miles, making it more difficult to prevent a ship suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction from approaching U.S. shores. Maritime security can be problematic with 7,500 foreign-flag ships making 51,000 calls annually to U.S. ports.

In a domestic security crisis, Northern Command would provide military forces to support civilian authorities, but those forces always would remain within the military chain of command, McHale stressed. By law, military troops cannot engage in domestic law enforcement.

McHale's office, meanwhile, is involved in redefining the role of the National Guard. The Guard's training largely is designed to meet its war-fighting strategic reserve function. In the future, said McHale, the Guard needs to be "more deeply involved in homeland defense."

The Guard will continue to serve in its war-fighting role overseas, he said, making it unlikely that it will become "exclusively a homeland defense force." Rather, the goal is for the Guard to be a "balanced force," said McHale. He noted that the Guard already has taken on significant homeland defense responsibilities. It is deploying 32 "civil support teams" that would respond to incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. Even when there are no WMD, in any instances of terrorist activities that require military presence, Guardsmen generally are the first forces on the scene.